Thursday, March 1, 2012

How Much of this Free Crap Do You Use?

This morning my Kindle Fire finally graced my office doorstep and I have been busy making the Great Leap Forward. Moving the small mountain of electronic gaming data from my hard-drive into a format that I will actually read has been mostly painless but the sheer volume—we're talking a jaw-dropping 3,000+ PDFs--of it all has got me thinking about my own and others usage patterns.

It has been asked before elsewhere, but I am remain curious. It's not great secret that our hobby is saturated to the gills with published and electronic material. Adventures, settings, rules settings pile up at an astonishingly high rate, enough that I could safely say you'd never be able to process, let alone game with in a single lifetime.

Through the haze of that infoglut, what do you actually use? What free resources—let's leave out rule sets here--do you find yourself using the most that have come out of gaming blogs or forums? Do you find yourself using those freebies less or more than published material you've paid for?

24 comments:

I find that I honestly use free stuff more than published books, and the free stuff I use tends to come from blogs. Part of it is that I've always preferred to make my own stuff instead of buying supplements, part of it is because I think the best material is coming out of the blog world.

I have a file folder on my laptop labeled Virtual DM Crate; it's got all the stuff I use on at least a semi-regular basis.

Looking through it, I can see it's got a lot of tables yanked from Zak's blog, Jeremy Duncan's random demon appearance table, the Hill Cantoncs Compendium, the Secret Santicore pdf, my own Flavors of Fear pdf, some of Jeff Rient's greatest hits, and a bunch of stuff from Trey's Weird Adventures posts.

I will take it as an auspicious sign that the first person to respond is the author of one of my favorite freebies (and used in an inspirational sense at least), 13 Favors of Fear.

I should have copped to it in the post (hey trying not to swing my loaded questions even further) but I use the free stuff I have accumulated at an exponentially higher rate than the material I have paid for.

To be honest, I use very little of it, because I have a strong preference for printed material. If it's not something that I can have open at the game table, I'm probably not going to use it. Until I have money to blow on a tablet or something like that, that's just the way it is.

I have a strong preference for printed material too, for the simple reason that my eyes and brain just can't read more than a 2-3 pages of a PDF on a desktop without blanking out.

I was going as far as compiling all my freebies into bound collections and having it printed Office Despot. But I have a very limited amount of time and energy for that.

I think this Kindle dealy may revolutionize all this. I found myself really digging into the Burtrus Gazetter, a large and free PDF regional guide to a section of Tekumel (http://home.earthlink.net/~panchakahq/main.html) , and was thinking this is easily the best setting material I have read in quite a while. Far, far better than anything I have purchased.

I use free stuff all the time. I use character generators when building PCs and NPCs for games like GURPS. Monsters and magic-items from Taichara's Hamsterish Hoard are come up constantly in my D&D-ish play. I use freebie maps cribbed from all over the place, some with keys and some without. I used to constantly reference Wikipedia articles on D&D monsters all the time for new ideas, and will again when I start a new campaign. I've got loads of stuff on tricks and traps culled from here and there on the internet. I use name generators all the time. I use blogs like this one to keep my enthusiasm for gaming up when it flags and give me new ideas when my imagination's feeling pooped out.

All that said, I know I've barely scratched the surface of all the free stuff on my hard drive, forget what's actually out there on the net. And as far as use goes, nothing matches the use my purchased core books get. But for everything else, free far outweighs bought in terms of at-the-table use.

The free stuff I use generally comes from blog posts. This has more to do with the electronic format - I find reading longer pieces (such as rules supplements) to be too much of an eyestrain in PDF format.

As an example, there are a number of ideas from the Hill Cantons Compendium that I use in my home games, but I had only skimmed the document until I picked a physical copy from Lulu.

I don't believe this has anything to do with the idea that money = greater value. There are many rulebooks I have paid for that I thought were a waste of my money, and many bits and pieces ripped from blogs that I believe to be of great value. It simply speaks to the limitations of the electronic format.

"many bits and pieces ripped from blogs that I believe to be of great value. It simply speaks to the limitations of the electronic format."

And again why I wish more bloggers were doing pdf and/or print-on-demand compilations of their greatest hits. I still stand by my post All that is Solid Melts Into Air, if that content doesn't end up in more usable formats my fear is that a lot of it will just float away over time.

I tend to take ideas, like the one page dungeon/wilderness concept and do my own thing with them. I am seriously considering using some more free adventures in my upcoming campaign, though, because I'm feeling kind of lazy.

I have a lot of PDF books I picked up from drive thruRPG and places but some books that might get shared about during a game (like Traveller rules, my Beacon rules, etc) I really want a hardcopy. Otherwise tables and charts I like to have in electronic format for quick access.

For running a game however Dyson Logos' maps converted to PDF and lovingly annotated in Goodreader or ezPDF are worth more to me at the table than all my printed or PDF 'modules' put together.

It's slightly harder to read multipage content on a tablet than it is a physical book so don't do it, I make it single page. Printed modules with pages of room/encounter keys you had to flip between were always problematic for me so I tended to gravitate to one page dungeons or formats with a map and facing key. Now I can turn that two page spread into a single page with a huge map and pop up notes I can activate when required.Its great.

You want the truth? Ok I use the freebies more then the printed material. I miss things like Dragon Magazine, & Dungeon. The free stuff allows me to cherry pick some great material. The Hill Canton's Compendium is one of the things I'm constantly looking & thinking,'Why the Hell didn't I think of that!' I've used material for complete campaigns. Is there way too much free stuff? You bet! But its the quality that is coming out of the blog world that really inspires me these days. I'm sorry but the Drivebyrpgs of this world can't compete for my dollar with things that have emerged from the blogsphere! I've got three large binders full of stuff that I constantly go back to again & again. Some of the stuff from here is nicely bundled into those. So yes I love hard copy more then pdf but please don't let the stuff slow down on my account. Thanks for doing such awesome stuff! Best regards..

My first thought was, “Not enough!” Then I realized that the same can be said about my purchased print stuff. These days, thanks to the iPad, anything in electronic format—free or not—is more likely to get used since I always have it with me. Or can transfer it from my computer at home quickly. And I can use “search” to find it. But the truth is I’ve not yet learned how to organize my resources.

A big part of that probably comes down to the fact that I’m only a part-time GM. I’m a player at least as often—if not more often.

I have a laptop/tablet as my DM screen. All my notes are there, as are all my pdfs and such. I keep track of baddie hitpoints and take quick notes on one piece of paper, as I refer to that most frequently and allows me to keep my focus on the table and the faces on it. The tablet often goes to the screensaver, but then I need it and access is quick.

Stuff I use most on that tablet:

*Maps - good maps as evaluated by Melan's analysis of nonlinear decision points. I get some from paratime, some from dragonsfoot, some from random other sources. Despite the dungeons I've made in sketchup, I most often steal a map, load it into journal and (using the stylus of the tablet) write and draw on the map itself.*Names - squid.org and the everchanging book of names (a utility, not a web page)*Anagram server - lately I've been using this because some of my players like solving them and I like dropping obscure hints.*Zak's list of dungeon ingredients. Not a pdf, but copy-pasted from one of his posts. I use it less now that it has changed my dungeon-making.*Google image search - I have >100MB of pictures of fantastic places, paintings, portraits, etc. that I refer to as inspiration and to assist in describing stuff to the players.*Dungeon Alphabet - paid for. I rarely use the actual results, but it is great for inspiration.

I don't use a lot of free stuff as is, but I will cut and paste and mess about with odds and sods from PDFs and blogs and whatnot to make my own rules and adventure documents which I will print out for actual use. I don't have a tablet, but had been thinking of getting one, but judging by the comments above it doesn't look like they will be as useful as a hardcopy.

I download literally tons of stuff, always intending to read it later, and then I read probably 1/10th of what I download. Short (2-3 page) documents get read through completely while longer ones I typically skim through...my mind just cannot process more and I rarely have the time for longer documents. What do I use though? Very little, I typically pull ideas from here, an image from there, a name from that place, etc, etc. I do not think I have ran a 'published' item in maybe two decades.